The Hoarfrost

I wake up frequently these days. Usually between two and three in the morning. I lay there for hours and repeat over and over the things I need to do or, most hauntingly, the things I should have said but didn't or the kindnesses I overlooked or didn't respond to appropriately. I think about the people I miss and the moments which have fully passed and will never return. I think about my children and am haunted at the world they will inherit; I wonder if this childhood will be enough to equip them with the courage and the skills and the peace-of-mind required not simply to exist but to actually thrive. I hope, to my very marrow, that I am not breaking them. I wonder if all parents break their children a little bit, despite their best intentions. I do not want to break my children. And yet, at three am, I am powerless to do anything but mull over all the missed cuddles or to fixate on the moments I lost my temper or to think about the way working all these hours may be shaping them or their view of my own priorities.

And it is at three in the morning, so very far from sunset and so very long until sunrise that weird pieces of art stick in my mind and I mull them over and the meaning they have now in my life, at this later stage, when I am not young anymore but not fully middle-aged. 

Last night, I woke up thinking about Love Actually, which is not a movie that should wake you up in the middle of the night. There's a scene where Emma Thompson, in the full power of her actress earnestness turns to a husband she has recently discovered is cheating and asks, "Would you stay, knowing life would always be a little bit worse?" Her courage in that moment is startling. She should be hitting him and throwing things and burning the roof down. And yet, she doesn't. She simply wonders at the fact that what he has done will alter things permanently and it is the loss of the way things were which causes her to grieve. It is a mourning for a quality of life her husband's actions have wholly and utterly extinguished.

This scene sticks in my mind, because isn't it the way of things that we are all constantly asked to stay, knowing that some things will always be a little bit worse? I think my mom sensed a tide changing when my oldest brother went to college. She wept and wept and wept, not as though her oldest son was on his way to college, but as a mother grieving for the end of an entire chapter of life. And that really was the end of our five-person family unit. Nothing was ever the same after he had gone because there was always an empty seat at the table and things were always, just very marginally, a little bit worse. His absence was palpable, even in the most joyous moments.

One of the dearest and best friends of my life mourned similarly at the end of our college career. I was just raw excitement and eagerness for my next step; I was ready to leave campus and to enter the world of teaching and to move to a new state. I remember her sadness and not fully grasping it in that moment. But I understand now in a way that wounds me deeply. What she saw and knew and felt with a maturity I could only hope to have over a decade later is that geography and relationships and years would come between us and the moments of living a door away from one another were likely gone forever. She saw the changing tide and did her best to prepare and to cherish the fleeting moments which remained. I flew, glibly, without a thought for the way that the wind and the rain and the ice and snow chisel us slowly and gradually and indelibly.

I am able to contextualize this a bit now. These changes, these small things occur with the consistent flow of a river over thousands of years, except now I do not fly courageously and without a second thought into the future. Now, this many years into life, I can sense the changes and these are the things that knock on my door in the darkest night. My oldest child is often okay sitting many feet away from me and has utterly lost the instinct to reach out and touch my arm as we watch a movie. My son no longer crawls into my bed with an eagerness to fold into my body (the same body that only four years ago felt like his body) in the way he did when he was younger. My lingering, meandering, early days of motherhood are passing into ones where I can share art and movies and ideas and jokes but there is a certain intimacy left behind; there is a quiet to our lives we will never revisit or regain. The only way is forward and in that direction lies independence and separation and growth and challenge and, ultimately, just me, me, me, me, me without the little bodies to which I have grown so accustomed.

The weight of the passage of years feels so heavy in the depth of the night. The lovers I so fully left behind, whose lips I'll know only in memory and in fleeting fancy of bad jokes in hostels or the intimacy of overly-warmed dorm rooms. The friends who knew me the minute we shared the same space, who made foreign places feel immediately like home. My grandparents and my older relatives whose stories I am less and less likely to hear again and whose comfort I have come to rely on for stability as I navigate adulthood. The season of youth, where your skin and your body and your damn sleep work exactly as they should; I feel its creep slowly, slowly, slowly toward middle age and I mourn, prematurely, my physicality and a body which works precisely as it should and with a strength and resilience and flexibility upon which I have very much grown accustomed but know will not always be a guarantee.

Would you stay? Knowing that things will always be a little worse?

And yet, at this precipice of unknowing with enough loss behind me to understand the potential depth of the crevasse of grief, there is the knock, knock, knock of the things that lie ahead. Of the people and the animals and the world I have yet to know. Listen quietly now. Can you hear it? The leaves of spring vibrate silently beneath the soil and bits of my soul, immersed deeply in strangers I have yet to know, await our acquaintance. There will be moments of great joy. Moments of celebration. There are whispers of love, love, love which wait eagerly for the quiet, intimate moments between familiar lovers, for the wedding celebration of a friend maintained (improbably) over decades, and the slow healing of the soul after a year of despair and deep grief.

I woke up yesterday to a bitter cold. A hoarfrost descended overnight and turned the familiar world into  fairy tale. In the quiet hours of the morning, I took the dog for a run on a trail I have visited almost daily since we moved here. And yet, that world and that trail upon which I have nearly every rock memorized, was something new. The world I had previously memorized was new and imbued with potential, a reminder that growth and rebirth and reinvention are as intricately tied to the passage of time as loss and grief. There is still joy, the air hummed, and there are new projects to pursue. You are still here, it said, and there is much, much to be done.